Lee: Spam is not curable, but it is treatable

Updated 1:30 pm, Thursday, May 31, 2012

Q: I get about 500 spam messages per day. Is there any way to slow it down or stop it?

A: Unfortunately, unsolicited commercial email, or spam, is a fact of life on the Internet. Once your email address gets out in the wild, you are subject to receive any number of advertisements as well as online scams delivered directly to your inbox.

Any time you sign up on a site that requests your email address or you submit your email address to a corporation or organization, your address can be sold in bulk to online advertisers.

If you publish your email address online, it can be scooped up by programs called bots that scan the World Wide Web for anything with an @ symbol in it.

The reality is that once your address starts receiving spam messages, there is little you can do to stop it. Your only option is to filter it out.

There are many programs available, both free and commercial, that will scan your incoming email messages and filter out suspected spam.

SpamFighter is a well-regarded free spam filtering program that has received many good reviews. It seems to work well, but the free version inserts its own advertising into the program and into your outgoing messages.

You can turn this off by paying for the full version, so it might be worth having a look to see if the program does a good job and then going ahead and paying for the commercial version. You can get it at www.spamfighter.com.

Another option is Cloudmark Desktop One from www.cloudmarkdesktop.com, which offers a free version with good functionality and a paid version with extended functionality.

Keep in mind that spam filtering on your own can be tricky, and there are trade-offs using these tools. But if they can block out the masses of clutter, then they might be worth it.

For me, the best option has been to use an email service with excellent spam filtering built in. I switched my email to Google's Gmail years ago and have been quite happy with it.

In the last 20 days alone, my Gmail has caught and filtered almost 5,000 spam email messages and moved them to a separate folder where I can review them, trash them or ignore them altogether. Once the message has been in the spam folder for 30 days, Gmail automatically deletes it so I don't have to bother with the spam at all if I don't want to.

Gmail can be accessed from a Web browser or from email programs such as Thunderbird, Outlook or Windows Live Mail. The best part of having an email service like this is that even if I change Internet service providers, my email address stays the same.

If you switch to Gmail, I believe you will see a dramatic decrease in the number of unwanted messages entering your inbox. And Google makes it easy enough to switch, as described in its article, "Switch to Gmail," at mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/switch.html.

Write Jay Lee at helpline@chron.com. View more questions and answers at the Help Line Blog at blog.chron.com/helpline. Lee co-hosts the radio show Technology Bytes from 8 to 10 p.m. Wednesdays on KPFT 90.1 FM. The program is also available at www.geekradio.com. Lee cannot personally answer all reader questions.